In a future post I’ll show some data on local versus country tax collections and spending, but here is a policy I would support at the county level. I’d support taking 50% of current county expenditures, eliminate a slew of county programs, and instead use it all, annually, to advertise our area to people from outside the community. This advertising would not be to promote vacations here, but to promote relocations here. Even if every one of those dollars were wasted getting 1 family per year to relocate here, I argue this would be a better use of funds than we currently see. But I suspect the gains would be better.

But it’s the weekend, and we keep our thoughts short on weekends, so we’ll end there for now.

By the end of the book, I am not quite sure what he wants. There are many pages dedicated to the horrific conditions that prevailed (and still do) in some places. But in the next sentence he seems to also denigrate anything that is done to ameliorate such things. For example, in talking about the exercise facilities, hair cuts, massages, dry cleaning and even “sleep pods” that are offered by some employers – the author ends the passage by saying that all of this is a way to induce workers to never have to go home so that they could work all the time.

I’d like to see an author write down simply what they expect the world to look like and whether anything done by a corporation for and to its workers is agreeable. I also find it odd that such tensions arise in a book like this, and at the same time there is a yearning in society among some folks for corporations to do even more for their workers – provide more health insurance, allow them to spend more time at work on volunteer activities, and the like.

I found my head spinning a few times in the book. Here is one passage:

Managers have inclined toward … more benevolent policies when they faced the following … a liberal or progressive national political climate … since they first came here in the 1980s, Japanese automakers with U.S. operations have been keenly aware that they must work hard to be perceived as good neighbors rather than as interlopers who are stealing away American jobs and wealth.

There are way too many quotes like that in the book for my taste, and I’d be blogging it way too much if I focused on them. But it’s nice to know that the 1980s were a time of Progressivism in the US (did someone tell this to Krugman, DeLong, Pelosi, Obama, and the current left?) It’s also nice to know that this simple idea seems to have been refuted by the author with the stroke of a pen.

And here’s another example of the non-charitable, broad-brush view (straw man-ish too) of non-Progressive ideas that I encounter quite a bit:

The bottom line: American conservatives and many businessmen have long maintained that all problems can be solved via the free market and private enterprise.

Really?

I used to think precisely the opposite.

Detroit was unimportant when the Federal Reserve Board was created in 1912.  Federal Reserve Banks were established in Cleveland and Chicago, also both St. Louis and Kansas City; but, like the entire West between Dallas and San Francisco, Michigan was still an economic frontier.

In the 1850s, copper mines in the Upper Peninsula fed the U.S. Mint, one reason for James Longacre to put an Ojibway (Chippewa) bonnet on Miss Liberty for the new cent coin of 1859.  The mines were prosperous for nearly half a century.  Some of them even issued their own currencies.  Then, they gave out.  Lumber, too, had been big, giving many towns streets of huge Queen Anne and Victorian Eclectic houses. Paul Bunyan was said to have logged here.  But the fact is that Michigan was settled a generation later than Ohio (1803), Indiana (1816), and Illinois (1818), becoming a state in 1837, ahead of Wisconsin (1838).  It is off the main east-west corridor. Surrounded by four of the five Great Lakes, it enjoyed cheap water transport – but water is slow and railroads are fast and time is money.  Michigan was left behind.

Consequently, it is a very large state with very many small towns, mostly 20 miles – a day’s walk – apart.  Some became cities: Battle Creek, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, Saginaw.  They validate the theory of urbanist Jane Jacobs that the city, not the nation, is the true geographic unit of culture and commerce.  Generally, each had one (sometimes two) dominant industries, but in no case did the larger sector overpower the mix of the others.  Midland, home of Dow Chemical, is the exception.  Many towns remained heterogeneous centers for surrounding farms and villages.  That mix includes the people.

Broadly, Michigan was settled from New York, giving the state its own Livingston County, and towns of New Buffalo, Utica and Rochester.  But in addition, immigrants came from Europe.  Cass County in the southwest corner north of Indiana was settled by manumitted slaves in 1849.  Today, Asians are the largest ethnic minority in Ann Arbor (25%).  Dearborn is home to America’s largest Middle Eastern enclave; we even have Arabic TV and radio.

The five county (originally tri-county) Metro Detroit corner stands alone, calling the rest of Michigan “out-state.”  The lower peninsula is arbitrarily divided by an east-west line from Bay City to Grand Rapids.  Everyone “downstate” goes “up North” for weekends, holidays, and vacations.

You never ask anyone to do anything from Labor Day to Christmas until you are sure that it will not interfere with hunting.  From youths to disabled veterans, from bow and arrow to rifles to muzzle-loaders, from does (“antlerless deer”) to bucks, from turkeys to bears, Michiganders hunt by special permit.  In 2004, 28,000 mourning doves – the bird of peace – were “harvested” but the hunt was discontinued.  The traditional regular deer season., November 15 to 30, is good time to stay indoors, unless you want to spend two weeks being drunk and growing a beard.

And yet, in the summers, about 25 miles southwest of Grand Rapids, almost to Lake Michigan, where once stood the hopeful town of Singapore, the village of Saugatuck is a gay-friendly tourist trap.

Michganders love tourists… as long as the visitors remember that they will never be locals.  Families from downstate have vacationed to the same towns and villages up north for three generations, retired there, and never became locals.  Best you can do is to be “cabin people.”  Worst you can be is a “fudgy” for the tons of Mackinaw Island fudge tourists consume.

Michigan is a state of contrasts and contradictions.  Perhaps the significant symbol is the wolverine.  Mascot of the U of M sports teams, a soubriquet of George A. Custer’s Civil War troopers, a wolverine sighting in 2004 was the first in 200 years.  But the wolverine is one of the few animals that will attack a human unprovoked, which may be why the Native Americans here gave that name to the settlers who drove them from their lands.

Every Labor Day since 1961, several thousand Michiganders walk across the Mackinac (rhymes with Saginaw; honest) Bridge that ties the “U.P.” (Upper Peninsula) with the “Mitten” (Lower Peninsula).  The map of Earth at Night reveals a large bright corner of the Lower Peninsula, the multi-county region north of Toledo, Ohio, to the Saginaw-Bay City gateway to the “Thumb” where Paul Bunyan still cuts lumber.  On the other side of the Lower Peninsula, the area around Grand Rapids is less bright, seemingly a reflection of Chicago, which is accurate enough, economically.  Between them and spreading northward small cities and big towns sparkle – Battle Creek, Kalamazoo, Lansing, Midland, Holland, Traverse City, Ludington, Chesaning, Clare, Cadillac, … easily 20, maybe 30 in all.  The sprinkles contrast with the empty green of state and federal forests, small farms, and crossroads villages.  You need a special vista even on the ground to find the towns of the largely unsettled U.P.  Where once were copper mines now five state prisons provide employment.  Not exactly the waters around Devil’s Island or Alcatraz, the U.P. is no place for a city boy to be alone at night.

Everyone knows that Michigan exports cars.  We also export college graduates.  Statistically, up to 28% of all working adult Americans claim to have bachelor’s degrees.  In Michigan that number is solid.  Two Big Ten state universities dominate public visibility, but in addition, a network of small state universities dots both peninsulas: Wayne State, Eastern Michigan, Western Michigan, Central Michigan, Northern Michigan, and Michigan Tech, 15 in all.  Add to those up to 90 private colleges (depending on how you count “independent” campuses).  We also import students to fill those schools, which is another way to export education.  The inputs are impressive, but the lack of opportunity takes people away.

The decline of the automotive industry is neither recent nor novel.  From the earliest days, failures, mergers and acquisitions were the hallmarks of growth. Henry Leland acquired a factory where the chief engineer refused to market his untested product.  Displaced, Henry Ford took his car to a new workshop.  Leland later sold his Cadillac factory to General Motors.  Ford Motor Company acquired Lincoln.  Hudson merged with Nash to form American Motors; Packard merged with Studebaker.  The Duesenberg came and went.  Of course, only Ford and General Motors were truly Detroit firms.  Checker’s headquarters were in Holland, Michigan, on the west side of the state.  The Duesie was made in Auburn, Indiana, between Fort Wayne and South Bend.  Although Hudson was local to Detroit, Nash was in Kenosha, Wisconsin.  But Ford and GM proved to be the two largest automakers, and they made Detroit the automotive capital of the world.

In 1900, Detroit was a fair to middling Midwest city of 285,000 with a broad range of small factories, large shops, retail and wholesale trade, served by water and rail.  By 1930, the population had quintupled to 1.6 million.  The high pay and automated routine of mass production meant that you did not need a good education to get a good job.  By 1980, when UAW members were smashing Japanese automobiles for TV news cameras, three generations of Detroiters could not help their children with their homework – and saw no reason to.  Then, the jobs went away.

That easy generalization covers too much important and contrary fact.

Many Detroiters did value education; and their investment in it took them to the suburbs.  A large number were Catholics.  Founded in 1701 by the French, the fort, post, port,

St. Anne’s Church, and the town remained strongly French until the first wave of Irish immigrants in the 1830s.  The Potato Famine would bring more.   In 1830, Massachusetts was still collecting taxes for the Congregational Church.  So, Detroiters expected tax support for their schools, also.  It was not to be.  The anti-Catholic Know-Nothing political movement permanently segregated the parochial schools from the public schools.  It worked out well for the Catholics.  While blue collar work was always available, thousands became clerks, engineers, accountants, and lawyers.  Their wealth took them away from the city.

We all know Silicon Valley and Route 128.  Detroit was home to the Burroughs Corporation before it purchased Sperry to form Unisys.  Also, today Compuware is headquartered in a new building in the old Campus Martius in downtown Detroit.

Living in St. Louis, William Seward Burroughs (1857-1898) was granted five patents for adding machines in 1888.  The American Arithmometer Company grew steadily for ten years.  Burroughs passed away.  In 1905, company president Joseph Boyer changed the name of the business to the Burroughs Adding Machine Company and moved it to Detroit.  The company now employed 1,200 and sold 7,804 machines that year.

In 1906, the Ford Motor Company created “The Burroughs Special” a businessman’s car with an integrated rack to hold an adding machine.  Detroit and Burroughs were destined for a long and profitable relationship.

Overall, through the next eighty years, right up to the merger with Sperry to create Unisys, Burroughs was always an aggressive buyer of small firms.  Their goal was not to restrict competition, but to acquire technology.  The same motive led them to hire as consultants researchers whose names stand out in the history of computing, among them Irven Travis, Edsger Dijkstra and Donald Knuth.

The Great Depression motivated banks to invest in machinery that made their operations both cheaper and more reliable.  By 1935, the company touted over 400 different “standard” models, a near-miracle of specialized production that would not be mimicked by other industries until the 1980s.

In 1952, Burroughs fabricated the memory for ENIAC, developed at the Moore School of Engineering of the University of Pennsylvania.  The company won a contract for SAGE (Semi-Automatic Ground Environment), the air defense program of NORAD running on MIT’s “Whirlwind” computer which was built by IBM’s Lincoln Laboratory for the Office of Naval Research.  SAGE boasted magnetic core memory, video displays, algebraic programming language, the ability to run simulation programs, and parallel processing, as well as one of the first computer networks.

Burroughs did not begin production of its own computers until 1964.  Even at its best of times, the company only garnered about 3.5% of the market, one of computing’s “Seven Dwarfs” under the shadow of IBM’s 73.5% market share.  Even so, the company’s decades of selling hundreds of varieties of calculators, primarily to banks and other financial businesses, gave it a loyal following.  By 1976, sales exceeded $2 billion; and 50,000 people were employed.  Ten years later, Burroughs paid $4.78 billion for Sperry.  The president of Burroughs and new CEO of Unisys was former Secretary of the Treasury W. Michael Blumenthal.

In many ways the opposite of Burroughs, Compuware is nonetheless a product of the information revolution that the older firm helped to create.  Whereas Burroughs clove closely to its main line of calculators until it was a late entry into computers, Compuware launched into unrelated ventures in professional hockey, as soon as its principals were comfortable being millionaires.  As a nineteenth century company, Burroughs was unimaginable without products to sell. When Peter Karmanos, Jr., Thomas Thewes and Allen B. Cutting launched Compuware in 1973, they really no idea where their business would take them.  In the words of the official company history: “Their vision [was] to help people do things with computers by providing their clients with professional technical services, allowing them to focus on their own core businesses.”  Helping people “do things with computers” is not a business plan that William Seward Burroughs would have recognized.

They began by outsourcing programmers, taking on odd jobs and subcontracting work for major firms in the Detroit area.  By 1977, Compuware had a product, Abend-AID.  For over 30 years, Abend-AID has proved itself to be Compuware’s reliable income stream with over 8,000 installations worldwide.  “Covisint” is an identity management tool first installed at over 6,000 suppliers to General Motors back in 2004.  Today, it is marketed to pharmacies.  Compuware now employs 4,275 people worldwide with 84 offices in 30 nations.

Detroit is not famous for computer hardware and software.  Michigan is not famous for Saran Wrap, or Styrofoam, products of Dow Chemical, headquartered in Midland.  Battle Creek is home to both Kellogg and Post.  Grand Rapids was a center for furniture and still headquarters Steelcase.  Also in Grand Rapids is Amway.  Each of these has a story as big, broad, complex (and quirky) as the automotive industry.  Perhaps what unites them is actually what separates them.  Urbanist Jane Jacobs suggested that cities are the true geographies of culture, commerce and innovation.  Nations (including our 50 states) are large, but irrelevant.

Another 17 of America’s richest people, including Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, junk bond pioneer Michael Milken and AOL co-founder Steve Case, have pledged to give away most of their wealth.

…

those who pledge are committing to give away at least half of their wealth to philanthropic causes either before or after they die.

A few points and questions without comment:

1. What do the critics of capitalism and the private functioning of charity have to say about this? Shall these things be ignored, just as the charitable acts of past “Robber Barons” have been ignored.
2. Is it not an open question about whether this is even a good idea? I assert that Zuckerberg, Gates, Buffett do ENORMOUSLY more good in the world by trying to double, triple and quadruple their fortunes than by giving it away. Think about why. I think if I were rich, I would ask other rich dudes to sign a pledge that committed them to competing with me on who could create more wealth – not who could get rid of it the fastest.
3. If the government is so awesome, I sure hope to see these moguls giving all of this money to government. After all, isn’t government the world’s most efficient, benevolent, well organized and successful charity?
4. I’d like to make $50 billion, and then commit to giving half away by the end of my life. I think I could handle leaving myself and my heirs with a mere $25 billion.